Adflex Communications, inc.
Who we are
HQ : Tokyo
Established : 2008
Employees : 70
https://www.ad-flex.com/
Adflex Communications is an advertising agency that supports companies’ digital marketing, by seeking out the world’s most advanced marketing AI services and localizing them for Japanese companies.
As a business partner, we support the marketing activities of BtoC companies in industries such as finance, food manufacturing, apparel, and infrastructure.
From 2019, we began to develop our own services, and in the future we plan on investing further in in-house development to make marketing activities more efficient and elaborated.
As some of our group companies are specialized in TV and DM (direct mail), we plan to foster collaboration and develop services together in the future.
Our vision
Believe your beliefs
Philosophy: Believe your beliefs
Mission: Supporting the growth of Japanese companies and creating new industries
Reason: Japan’s Galápagos syndrome (= Japanese companies specialize in developing products for the domestic market, leaving Japan more and more isolated from other developed countries)
We assume there are three major factors leading to that situation:
- Poor foreign language proficiency
- Poor understanding of technology by top management
- Slow decision-making
We are worried about Japan’s decline and the lack of job option left in Japan for the future generations. The only way to prevent this from happening is for Japanese companies to grow further, or to create new strong industries.
We intend to support Japanese companies by finding cutting-edge technology services overseas.
Our services/products
We have three main services.
1. Service development for customers
Services that utilize AI in the digital advertising field. We are providing value to our customers by automating and refining labor-intensive way of advertising, utilizing AI services from overseas. Many of our partner companies are based in Israel and the United States. We customize and expand the functions of those services to meet Japanese specifications.
2. In-house development
We always look for new ideas to maximize our group companies’ assets (TV, WEB, and DM).
Recently, we have being developing and providing a service that combines TV and digital advertisement.
3. Development of services for more efficient and automated internal operations
We are trying to systematize the software part of our services (e.g., proposals and reports, which are still relying on person) and to provide a uniform service.
By consolidating and organizing our knowledge, we aim to deliver a higher, certain level of value to all of our customers regardless of the service price range.
Services currently under development: BI automatic reporting and proposal output.
Skills
Our engineering team
What projects/services is your engineering team working on?
Our development teams work on the three services mentioned above.
- Contracted development
- in-house development of new services
- in-house development of service improvement
What technologies are you using?
It is preferable if you are familiar with Python for AI-related services.
What type of engineers work at your company? What is their job content?
Our organization is very flexible and project oriented.
For this reason, it is an environment in which employees can develop their skills in a wide range of fields, meaning our members’ tasks are not limited to that of one position/job.
For example, one employee who joined us as internal SE three years ago is now part of the in-house development team. His skills are centered on network engineering, and although he has no experience in DB design or development, he is studying on his own to perform this new role.
Do you plan on using any new technologies in the future?
We have not yet decided but are looking into the field of block chain.
Our corporate culture
We see our organization as functional and rational.
First of all, because we see our company as a community, the hierarchical relationships are not very strict, and we do not define our jobs through rigid job descriptions.
To adapt to the quick changes in our industry, we are constantly working on project-based research, testing, and development for both internal and external purposes. Therefore, if you prefer a stable job in which you only perform fixed tasks decided beforehand, our company culture might not be a fit.
Our company is a good match for those who love working, want to tackle new challenges as soon as possible, and want to try and learn new things regardless of the field. We are regularly revising our organization system to take our employees current needs into consideration.
We call our model a “democratic top-down”: we have made it a rule to give any new service/system a try if 70% of the employees wish to implement it. We have also decided that if we deem it to be a failure, we will immediately cancel it, so it’s like we have a beta version of the organizational system running at all times.
We believe that it is more beneficial to introduce systems or rules requested by 70% of employees, rather than all of them, as a certain amount of risks and objection usually leads to more benefits overall.
Currently, we are introducing systems such as work from home, financial assistance for house rent, paid holidays by hour, and permission for side jobs.
